Nine Inch Nails released Year Zero Remixed in the United States on November 20, 2007, through Interscope Records. Styled Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, the album invited other artists to reshape material from Year Zero. The CD package also opened that process to fans: a DVD-ROM contained the source album’s multitrack recordings, allowing listeners to build their own versions.
Saul Williams opened the collection with “Gunshots by Computer,” adding a rap to music from “Hyperpower!” Elsewhere, Olof Dreijer expanded “Me, I’m Not” to nearly 14 minutes, while Ladytron worked a musical reference to “Closer” into “The Beginning of the End.” These were different ways of approaching the same collection of songs: adding a voice, extending an arrangement or connecting it to an earlier NIN recording. The CD contained 14 remixes and retained “Zero-Sum” as its closing track. The triple-vinyl edition changed the selection again, including an additional Ladytron treatment of “Capital G” that wasn’t on the CD.
Reworking completed records already had a substantial place in the NIN catalog. Fixed followed Broken in 1992, and Further Down the Spiral revisited The Downward Spiral in 1995. Year Zero Remixed continued that practice while giving its audience access to the recordings behind the finished music.
In an October 2007 interview with Wired, Trent Reznor traced his fan-remix experiment to trying GarageBand while promoting With Teeth. He loaded multitracks, sent them to his crew and received a country-western version of “The Hand That Feeds.” That response encouraged him to share the files more widely. “People can have fun, mess around,” he told the magazine.
The Year Zero Remixed DVD-ROM supplied material from all 16 songs on the original album. It included GarageBand and Ableton Live projects alongside individual WAV files, so listeners could work with the recordings in different editing programs. Ableton’s announcement described its files as separated by instrument. In practical terms, that let a fan isolate parts and change their relationships within a song. The package offered completed interpretations to hear alongside the components needed to develop another interpretation, with access extending across the original album rather than stopping at its singles.
Sharing those results was meant to be part of the release, too. An official remix site was planned to collect fan submissions, but its launch was delayed. In a website statement reproduced by Stereogum, Reznor said Universal had declined to host it over concerns that users could upload mixes containing material the company didn’t own. According to Reznor, the company feared that hosting such submissions would undermine its position in copyright disputes involving other platforms. Making the recordings available and hosting what people made from them had become separate problems.
By late November 2007, Reznor had put the remix site online using his own servers, as MusicRadar reported. Fans could download source recordings, upload their versions and have other members rate them. The release’s invitation to remix had acquired a working place for those recordings to circulate.
